THINKING ABOUT FISHTANK
LENSES BECOMING MIRRORS
A SHOW FOR NOW
Fishtank is not good. It’s a 24/7 streaming reality show where the audience can pay to send messages into the reality show house (they’re called TTS messages—text to speech). It’s like Big Brother except more internet-y, less politically correct, and with live audience participation. To some degree, it genuinely represents a new paradigm in media: real-time audience interaction in a program streaming across the globe without any sort of major network. It is the ultimate slop. It’s depressing, nothing really happens (one of the most exciting things to happen was a contestant masturbating in bed at the beginning of this season) yet I can’t stop watching, or more accurately, I can’t stop reading Fishtank threads on 4chan, which are better than watching the actual show. The best parts of the actual show, by far, occur when Sam Hyde shows up, the show’s host, and, in my opinion, the face of contemporary internet media (is that good or bad? you be the judge). Still, there’s something going on with Fishtank, it manages to offer something to chew on in spite of itself.
Satire and parody of contemporary society are almost impossible these days. It’s difficult to exaggerate something to comedic effect when the acceptance of castrating children is part of the contemporary milieu of Being a Good Person, when the largest mainstream news organization in the country films an anchor in front of a burning city while describing “fiery but mostly peaceful protests,” when a man who has already been president once is incessantly described as literally Hitler, when a person is foisted to presidential candidacy without a primary election in a bid to “save democracy,” when a man-made respiratory illness is cause to shut down the world for a year but its danger didn’t apply to those “protesting racism”—how can you make fun of the clown show? Telling the truth is a radical act these days; you might only be able to see the emperor’s lack of clothes behind a clown nose.
Fishtank isn’t so grand, it isn’t about saving the world or destroying it, The Future or The Past, it’s just a group of people in a house and that’s what makes it so compelling (this is, in my opinion, why movies about “saving the world” are often pretty boring: the scale is so big that there’s just nothing to relate to, who cares). None of the contestants on Fishtank have phones or internet access and this immediately raises interesting questions. Are the contestants, without phones, now “acting” more or less “natural?” What about when the pervasive panopticon in which we all live aurally manifests in disembodied voices—when the audience sends messages in real time to the contestants? Is it more “natural” for people to actually hear an audience, or to constantly imagine themselves in front of a silent one, an audience ground down into a little number on a screen?
Anyone going on Fishtank already has some kind of audience, performs in some kind of way. Social media turns you into a little porn star, the idea of performing for an audience is so ingrained in people now that it’s nearly impossible to imagine it any other way, and even if you did, by definition, no one would know about it because as soon as you share it with them you’re on stage. If you ever are not on stage, we will never know, but sometimes you can hint at it, you can unknowingly masturbate on a live camera feed, you can peek around a corner to see the actors laughing together behind the curtain. The fact that the audience can send messages to the Fishtank contestants actually, perhaps paradoxically, makes the contestants seem more real, more natural. The façade has dropped, the contestants are not pretending that they’re just documenting something without an audience in mind, they are constantly performing without the pretense that they are not.
But still, the actual show, the actual live streaming feeds of people living in a house together and perhaps doing some “challenge” (in previous seasons, the challenges progressively ramped up in their depravity, vomit and various bodily fluids eventually became commonplace, viewer discretion is advised) is not really that interesting. Fishtank is a mirage of an oasis in the desert of the real. (This is why I called it depressing earlier, I think Fishtank is the most interesting thing happening in contemporary media and that’s depressing (I wish people were making good art (and I could see it), the best parts of Fishtank are everything outside of Fishtank (i.e. Sam Hyde and the fake internet “community” “discussing” the show) (maybe it’s more depressing that I’m interested in contemporary media, that’s a fair assessment)).
Discussing Fishtank happens when the map is a full scale model of the territory. The decentralized nature of contemporary media has degraded one of the last vestiges of community in a dying empire: shared media experience. (Again, I’m calling this depressing—that watching the same TV show as someone else was at least some common cultural touchstone, some “real” world outside of your little box that confirmed others exist or maybe more fundamentally that there is a world beyond your immediate perception—that we were, before I was even born, already living in a world where media confirmed an objective world is, to me, depressing.) And this is why discussing Fishtank is more interesting than Fishtank itself: it’s a reminder of the objective world that we’ve lost, and it’s depressing because it’s a simulation of a simulation. It’s not even a reminder of the real world, it’s a reminder of extinct media about a real world. Instead of laughing about a show with your friends in the moment, no consideration of a bodiless audience, the best you’ve got now is sharing memes with internet strangers, and even doing that you’re making “content” for lurkers like me.
A MAN ONLINE
Sam Hyde has never confused me. It might be because I’m also a funny guy, a guy who values humor, a man with a soul. Maybe you get confused by Sam Hyde, maybe you think reality is contained in words, maybe you think you can fully understand the world through little graphs and models, maybe you think that if you string the perfect series of limited words together you can grasp the infinitude contained in every moment and you can cast a spell, capture the world, understand it all. I think it’s a fool’s errand (funny how the most Serious People are the ones who do that), boiling things down to mere words, I think the more you try describe something and break it down the less comprehensible it actually becomes. Is he playing a character? Is this a bit? Common questions from those unfamiliar with Sam Hyde’s work. The truth is it always depends: Sam Hyde is an actual person with a soul and you have to be an actual person with a soul (not a machine modeler) to get it. (You might get it and not think it’s funny, fair enough.)
That Sam Hyde is a man with a soul makes his work compelling in this age of man-machines. He’s the best part of Fishtank because he’s a good performer (all the best Fishtank contestants: Jon, Letty, Cole, Jimmy, Alex B., have similarly been performers and embraced their roles (consciously or not)) and he is a comedian, a jester.
(Clip is from this discussion between Jonathan Pageau and Owen Cyclops)
I am a little torn about Sam Hyde being one of the best living artists. On one hand, I love his work and I think he is a genius, on the other hand, I think that my thinking that, is, to some degree, a symptom of a deeply sick world. Perhaps in another age, when the prevailing sentiments weren’t so sick (before God was dead), grotesquery and poop in cups might be more disturbing, it might simply be sick. But if everything were sick, then you might have to be one sick fuck to say anything true. Fishtank is the video essay summary of Baudrillard’s work, the perfect media for our sick age. The paltry monetary prize for the winning contestant doesn’t really matter, the hope for winning is that you can continue to perform on camera for an audience, you can be a little porn star, you can slide deeper into the media-dream. Sam Hyde is just Morpheus, a messenger in dreams, a character who guides Neo out of The Matrix, the jester who restores True authority: most would rather stay asleep.
You can watch the show live right now: fishtank.live. (I am not affiliated with the show in any way, I’m just a lurker, I’m just the audience.)
I saw Sam Hyde and the crew perform stand up last week. Great show, I laughed my sack off, and I have nearly no patience for or interest in stand up comedy or public performance anymore. A personal problem but also a problem in the world.
On the other hand, what that show did bring into stark relief was something missing from my life and likely the lives of many others. Here was a small group of men, working together and independently on a project with verve and muscle that has some, however limited, effect on the larger world. They're doing it unapologetically, without undue deference to contemporary pieties. Their audience knows what they're in for and respects and enjoys what they're doing, and everyone else can find a fainting couch.
And here I am, in utter physical isolation, with my closest male friends hundreds of miles away, and no shared physically rooted patterns or projects, with a digitally based "career" in which I write to a totally incoherent assortment of people, many of whom would most likely disown me if they caught on to some of my political/cultural leanings or if I spoke more frankly in general. I'm not envious of those guys, I don't bring this up to seethe, but only to highlight how rare it is now, and I suspect not just for me, to feel grounded in some kind of brotherhood, to be oriented by a shared purpose with however meager a hope of influencing the larger world, beyond the sad and threadbare consolation of this rinkydink therapeutic artistic expressive practice, hemmed in by apprehensions and insecurities.
You write pretty well. I haven't seen Fish Tank and probably won't. I can barely justify watching Sam Hyde or World Peace, and I don't know if I could spend more time on that kind of material. And this point deserves much more elaboration, and I say it to myself as much as anyone, but I don't know if the Baudrillardian/simulation analytical frame has any salience or power anymore; media analysis seems played out to me, still too dominated by a fascination with entertainment or stimulation that needs to be personally worked out and transcended in concrete and practical ways and not endlessly tweezered and microscoped and repeated.
I always found it quite sad that Sam basically build a platform for thousands of pay pigs to watch that garbage all day long, each idiot paying for their chance to post some ret@@ded super chat mocking a contestant. The contestants themselves are likely on the spectrum, Sam and his sycophants push them through a harsher variation of the Stanford prison experiments.